The web and social media have long been seen as a way to sell theatre tickets, and the use of webcasting, led by NT Live, is extending audience reach. But the potential of "digital native" theatre has been tapped only by a few pioneering artists and companies. It's something we at Futuredream are trying to address with the Theatre in the Cloud project, which asks theatre-makers to think about creating characters and stories specifically for social media and the web.

Liveness is the essence of theatre but liveness is also becoming blurred: a webcast watched with others; a broadcast event discussed on Twitter; instant messaging conversations over a period of time. Can the sophistication of our digital lives open up new possibilities for theatre-makers? Drama stems from the human need to tell stories as a way to understand ourselves. The internet is flooded with characters and viral stories made and presented by a huge variety of people, from teenagers to commercial marketers. Successful YouTubers such as PewDiePie and Jenna Marbles skilfully sustain and grow their huge fan followings – it doesn't happen by accident. They entertain a generation identified by their capacity for what has been summed up as "creation, curation, connection and community".

It's easy to dismiss all this activity as superficial, fleeting and inextricably linked with advertising – but surely that is why theatre-makers should try to come up with something more thoughtful, moving and meaningful? Why aren't theatre-makers learning how to use their offline skills to create and sculpt deeper, long-lasting online experiences?

There are so many strands of potential experimentation that it is hard to know where to start: more theatrical use of social media; technically enhancing webcasts to be richer, more interactive experiences ("Wouldn't it be great if our screen enabled us to see everyone else in the audience?" argues Ben Hudson, currently undertaking a PhD at The University of Kent entitled Virtually Funny: mediatised standup comedy); embracing augmented reality so that it is not just a novelty add-on and audio drama for podcasting and digital radio. All are ripe for exploration.

Nearly four years ago (several generations in internet terms) the RSC's experiment Such Tweet Sorrow, a Twitter staging of Romeo and Juliet, threw down the gauntlet - and it seems something of a tragedy that no one has come back to meet that challenge.

David Harradine of Fevered Sleep has commented: "It just feels like there are two different things going on … The shift toward broadcast has been driven a lot by access questions in larger organisations, but for smaller companies it can be about exploring ways of working that dissolve some of the boundaries between forms." But the experimentations of smaller companies are dispersed and virtually invisible to a broader public.

Theatre-makers have never been restricted by space. Performance has been presented in amphitheatres, market squares, proscenium arch theatre buildings, black boxes, non-theatre buildings, streets and open spaces. Each space has inspired its own style of work: the right style for the web is still to be found. How do we find and engage the communities who will become our audiences? How are online audiences' behaviours changing? Let's try an iterative, experimental, fast-moving process that doesn't hang outdated notions of "failure" around artists' necks and, what's more, is fun for makers and audiences.